Talk WHAT: Philip J. Fleming (Motorola Wireless Systems Group): "The Near-Term Future of Wireless Voice Services" HOSTED BY: Andy Lippman, MIT Media Lab WHEN: Wednesday, December 1, 2004; 4:00 PM EST WHERE: Bartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab (E15) SUMMARY: Your cell phone will soon be capable of being a fully functioning end node in the Internet—on par with your laptop—and will support multiple wireless and wired interfaces such as 802.11, Bluetooth, USB and, of course, "cellular." This naturally leads one to wonder if applications that are currently associated with laptops could be moved to the cell phone. The question is particularly interesting for voice applications such as Voice-over-IP (e.g., Skype) because they enable peer-to-peer voice services and the hope of freeing us from the shackles of the telecom operators and their monthly bills. It may even lead to the standardization of the application programming interface on the cell phone. This talk provides a glimpse into the future of cellular-style voice services focusing on Voice-over-IP (VoIP) over the new shared packet data channels that will be built out by cellular operators over the next few years. Fleming discusses why this is important and how progress toward using the cell phone as a device for running VoIP over 802.11 could lead to the convergence of the "new cellular" and 802.11. He ends with a discussion around the questions: What will be the future role of peer-to-peer wireless voice services? What are the outstanding issues around its adoption in the mass market? How can researchers contribute to this important nascent cultural shift? BIO: Philip J. Fleming is a fellow of the technical staff in the Network Advanced Technology organization, a part of the Wireless Systems Group at Motorola, Inc. He is also the Motorola resident scientist at the MIT Media Lab for the 2004-5 academic year. After receiving a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan, he spent a year as assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University before joining Bell Laboratories. In 1991, he joined Motorola and built a group that became a center for simulation and analysis of emerging cellular networking technologies. His most recent work is in the convergence of wireless network standards enabled by Voice-over-IP, 802.11, 802.16, and new cellular data networking standards such as 1X-DO and HSDPA. His research interests are focused on system issues in wireless communication networks and the stochastic modeling and simulation of computer/communication systems. MIT Media Laboratory Home Page | Events Main Index